I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Polar App: How Mobile First Leads To Desktop Fast

The use of mobile devices has grown so fast that it is tempting to think that the desktop is dead. But although the growth in the sales of desktop computers is in the negative, there is still an installed base of billions world-wide and will be for decades to come. So how do we think about the desktop in the mobile age?

One answer is provided by Luke Wroblewski, the designer and mobile consultant who first coined the phrase “mobile first.” In his description of his book of the same title, he says that mobile first ”isn’t just an approach or strategy for designing for mobile platforms first, it’s a mindset, a philosophy and a must for evolving User Interaction design.” I check in with Wroblewski frequently to see how this philosophy is evolving, and our recent conversations have centered on what I would describe as a respect for the unique qualities of each device. And, guess what, the desktop is just another device.

With that idea in mind, I was very interested when Wroblewski introduced me to a new feature of his Polar app (which I previously wrote about here.) Polar, as you can see from the screen shot above, is a very simple app that lets you make binary polls that users can quickly vote on. The very success of the app has created a number of problems. The original audience for the app was designers and developers, so if you’re that kind of person (guilty as charged!) you would find a lot of the poll questions relevant. As the audience grew and began to include various tribes of young people, the raw feed of polls became more diverse and less specifically relevant to any given user. Although you can follow people on Polar, Wroblewski and his co-founder Jeff Cole (also CTO of PatientsLikeMe) decided that tags would be an effective way for users to be able to filter the full stream of polls.

So, for instance, that initial tech-oriented audience can follow #tech on Polar and return to relevance from #nails. The side benefit is that the same data model on the Polar server that supports the display of polls by tag within the app, also supports a web view of the same content. Although the app is iOS-only at this point, Wroblewski decided to explore what the desktop experience of these web views would be, and came up with an innovative solution.

If you look at the screen shot below, you will see a graphic to the right of the poll that instructs you how to use your keyboard’s arrow keys (up, down, left and right) to navigate the polls. This is a very common input method for desktop games, but almost entirely absent for navigating blocks of content on websites. (The arrow keys have been relegated to navigating text within blocks of content.) In the case of Polar, the only relevant input from the user is voting on a poll (through the left or right arrow) and advancing or back-tracking through the polls (down or up arrows.)

The desktop view of the polls contains very specific interaction zones. There is a scrolling column of thumbnails on the far left and a wider column of polls that you can scroll through on the middle-right. But the fastest way to traverse the polls and vote is to use the arrow keys in a game-like way. In my experience, this is actually faster than using your thumbs on an iPhone.

When you look at a web view from a mobile device, the format changes based on context. On a tablet, you get the elements of the desktop layout, but without the arrow key interaction, and on a phone you get just the central column of polls. The important point is that for each device, Polar has devised the most efficient means of input. Wroblewski discusses this process in a post on New Layouts for the Multi-Device Web. He writes, “Across all these devices from smartphone to desktop, our criteria for the Polar interface was ‘comfortable to use.’ That is we emphasized human ergonomics over typical visual design conventions. We wanted a design that was comfortable for phone, phablet, tablet, hybrid, laptop, and desktop users and adapted the interface as needed to align with how people use these distinct devices.”

We are entering a world of GoogleGoogle Glass and iOS in your car. The profusion of new devices is dizzying and designers and developers have to create some new conventions, as Wroblewski is doing with Polar here, to balance consistency of presentation and the unique opportunities of each format. This attempt is not without it’s perils as he describes for Polar: “The potential downside of this approach is that ‘comfortable to use’ doesn’t come through unless you are actually using the application. Looking at the Polar interface on a laptop can be a bit disconcerting because we’ve essentially left the middle of the page ‘blank.’ Just about every other Web page online centers their page layout and leaves the sides as empty columns.” As for the web views themselves, there is the risk that there will be no polls for a given tag. Fortunately, a little good humor can finesse any missing content:

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